angrymnk wrote:
With that out of the way lets looks at the following sentence.
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You have to look at the entire 8 years, not just cherry pick the worst one. Obama's economy hasn't yet managed to recover to where Bush's was
Let us see. Where was Bush's economy and the end of the eight year reign?
Low point in 2008 DOW was 8149. When Obama was taking over it was even
lower. What is it now? At the end of Obama's reign of terror? So how did he do on average? He only ***************************************** doubled it[/link]. Yeah. On average he did so much worse than his predecessor.
Um... That's not how you do averages. You add up all the values over the period in question and then divide them by the number of values you've used. You can't just look at the point at the beginning and the point at the end and subtract. Here's why:
Imagine two scenarios:
A. DOW starts at 10,000, goes up to 15,000 in the second year, stays there for 6 years, then drops down to 9,000 in the last year.
B. DOW starts at 10,000, goes down to 5,000 in the second year, stays there for 6 years, then jumps up to 11,000 in the last year.
By your ridiculous math, you'd say the economy was better in scenario B, but in reality it was much much better in scenario A.
Of course, all of this assumes that average market prices over a period of time is a complete (or even valid) measure of the entire economy. There's a lot more than just market prices involved. What's normally used are things like unemployment rate (and yes, adjustments for LPR should apply there), GDP growth rate, interest rates, inflation rates, wage levels, upward mobility rates, tax rates, debt rates, etc. Those are the factors that most directly affect the majority of the citizens economic prosperity. Can I get a job? Does that job pay enough? Will that job result in increased prosperity over time? Will the money I earn become less valuable over time? How much of those earnings to I get to keep? How much will I continue to keep over time? These are the questions most people are asking when they're trying to figure out if an economy is good or bad, not "how well did the market do?".
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Wait. Wait. Wait. I am cherry picking, right? We want to check averages and not just the worst time of the given president's reign, right?
Hwell,
on ******* average, DOW was 10500 when he took office, and what was it again when he finished?
Again. Start and finish values do not an average make. You're also missing context. Go look up the same values for the Clinton administration, then the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration. Notice a pattern? If you were to actually average the numbers in each set, you'd find that every single administration had a higher average than the one before. There's a number of factors for this, but the point is that dollar values go up over time. The numbers in the market, therefore, also go up over time.
What you're doing would be like me arguing that Obama's economy is worse that Bush's because a loaf of bread costs more today than it did 8 years ago. Um... That's inflation. It's normal (which is why, you'll notice, I didn't make this argument).
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Again, there are valid complaints about Obama, but saying Bush's economy was better is not really supported by facts.
Yes, it is. Unemployment was lower on average over Bush's term than it has been during Obama's. GDP growth was higher on average over Bush's term than it has been during Obama's. Inflation, adjusted wages, interest rates, etc, have been relatively unchanged. The point is that those trying to make Bush's economy look bad always do so by simply comparing start and end points, without looking at the middle. Bush was handed an economy with a low unemployment rate, but happened to leave office right in the middle of a recession, with a relatively high rate. So he's bashed for "loosing jobs", but the reality is that for the majority of his term, unemployment was quite low. Obama, on the other hand, was handed an economy with a highish unemployment rate, saw it immediately jump to a very high (10%) rate, stay there for a couple years, and then sloooooooowly trickle down until just in his last year and a half, it's back to where it was for most of Bush's term, and that only if you ignore the labor participation rate.
It's has been much harder to find a good paying job over the last 7 year than it was over the previous 8. And that's the fact that matters here.
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Maybe it was good for you? Are you basing your argument on an anecdote?
No. Based on actual numbers that aren't horrifically manipulated in order to support an absurd conclusion. Try checking out
this site. Plug in "last 20 years", and look at the period from 2000 on. Now. Apply this math concept called calculus and calculate the area under the line for the years from 2001-2009 and compare to the same calculation for 2009-2015. Heck. You don't need to calculate anything. One glance at the chart tells you that total unemployment over Obama's term has been much much much much much (do I need more muches?) higher.
That's how you compare these things. And when you do, it's really obvious that Bush's economy, while not perfect (no economy is), was much better in terms of jobs at least, than Obama's. It's not where the start and stop numbers are. It's the area under the line that matters.